


Open Plan

by PallasPerilous



Series: Inversions [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Birth Control, Castiel Behaves Like Endverse Castiel (Supernatural), Contractor Dean Winchester, Dead John Winchester, Fluff and Crack, Hurt/Comfort, Lawyer Sam Winchester, M/M, Masks, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of Cancer, Mind/Mood Altering Substances, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Omega Castiel (Supernatural), Omega Dean Winchester, Omega/Omega, Shiplap, Slow Burn, These tags are super heavy but everybody's a total cupcake, Yoga Instructor Castiel (Supernatural), quarantine & chill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:29:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25418488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PallasPerilous/pseuds/PallasPerilous
Summary: Be that as it may– this was Sam’s pet phrase coming out of law school until Dean roasted him out of it –be that as it may,the fact is that right now there is an obnoxiously attractive and basically helpless naked person off-gassing sex fumes in the spare room, and all Dean wants to do is find him some Gatorade and give him his underwear back.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Series: Inversions [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1841047
Comments: 28
Kudos: 84





	Open Plan

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to part 2! This is a direct follow-up to Beginner's Mind, so start there if you ain't already.
> 
> Chapter warnings: medically vulnerable person (he's fine tho), lots of healthcare and reproductive medicine chit-chat, mention of basic relationship and intimacy ethics, Dean ponders in very general terms the possibility of unknown consequences for others as a result of his past episodes of combining intimacy and substances.
> 
> Relevant tags to be added as I go, but this half of the story won't have quite so many Heavy Stuff Bomb Drops and nothing that isn't basically already introduced in Beginner's Mind – so if you made it through that one, you should be just fine here for the duration. Please let me know in comments if I've missed anything!

Dad’s place has a lot of questionable design choices.

Nothing outright _offensive_ – Dean has encountered kitchens with shag carpeting, staircases with two feet of clearance, an outlet installed _in a shower._ A shower _with an acrylic tub surround._ They literally cut out a duplex faceplate-sized hole right below the shower head. You kinda have to admire the commitment.

There aren’t any major era-specific issues either, like a sunken living room (“ _Ball pits_ ,” Ash calls them, in the grossest voice possible) or popcorn ceilings chock full o’ asbestos. It’s just small stuff that makes living there the _slightest_ bit shittier, which is also definitely not a perfect metaphor.

The garage is a prime example: even with all the shop stuff pushed up against the side, it’s about three inches too shallow to contain the full length of the Impala ( _literally every joke has already been made_ ). Break-ins aren’t really an issue on a dead end in the boonies, so before Dad gave up and just perma-loaned Dean the car, he’d lock the garage door at half-mast and toss on a military grade car cover. That worked fine in mild weather, but it’s bullshit for the other, you know, ten months of the year: _you_ try running a band saw in 95 degree heat and 70 percent humidity, or lying on a sneaker board with February racing up your ass. It is _rude_.

Dean knows he either needs to build the garage out, or just tear it down and install a pre-fab, but it’s somewhere around item nine zillion on his list. He hates to be reminded of the sheer magnitude of his list, so for the sake of his continuing sanity, he only goes into the garage when he needs to cut down some board or solder some piece of shit back together. Or when he needs to grab a respirator.

* * *

It’s _possibly_ overkill. He’s dealing with a hormonal yoga instructor, not a 600BF pressurized tank of polyurethane spray foam insulation (even if Dean’s seen some porn that suggests there are similarities). But the work party used up his back stock of disposables, so Dean has to strap on a big sweaty full face respirator with Pepto-pink filter booties, all of which makes him look like an extra on the set of _Contagion_. One who _doesn’t_ get to meet Kate Winslet.

He does at least have a fresh box of latex gloves ( _shut up, Sam_ ) so he isn’t isn’t going in with giant cowhide arc welding gauntlets. He’s _pretty_ sure that skin contact is a problem thing, or maybe he’s mixing that up with third grade cootie lore, but better safe than sorry, right? Fuck, his brain still feels like chunky stew, and they’re both gonna die.

The house is real quiet when he steps back in – the water’s off, though he thinks he can hear the bathroom fan still grinding away.

“Cas?” he yells, which probably just sounds like a muffled honk to anybody on the other side of this fucking respirator. No shocker that he doesn’t get a response, but Panic Brain immediately decides Castiel is splatted out naked and unconscious somewhere, simultaneously running a fever and freezing to death while maybe also bleeding from the head, since that seems to be their, whatsit, _motif._ Dean starts frantically clearing rooms like a one man SWAT team and doesn’t relax until he shoulders open the door of the not-an-office-anymore door and discovers Castiel. He’s wrapped up in the balding beach towel and inexplicably laid out on top of the plastic drop sheet, like Dexter has just stepped out for a snack break in the middle of cleaning up his latest murder scene.

Castiel opens his eyes at the sound of Dean clattering in – or maybe at the _smell_ of him clattering in, because Dean’s fucking blockers are across town, nestled up against Sam’s unspeakably gross Water-Pik in the world’s tiniest bathroom cabinet. Cas lifts his head up a couple inches to suss out the disturbance. His expression is more Wet Cat than Victorian Orphan, and his face is still kind of the wrong color, but now it’s a _different_ wrong color. So that’s nice! Taste the rainbow.

“Dean?” Castiel croaks, like anybody else could be this much of a fucking disaster before lunch.

“Dude, what the hell are you doing in _here_?” Dean whomp-whomps through the mask. “I was worried you’d crawled out into the bushes to die.”

Cas squints at the walls around him. “The paint smell helps,” he says. “Didn’t want to mess up your blankets.”

“They’re dog blankets, dude, I literally don’t care. I’m gonna bring you some water in a sec, but we’ve got some help on the way.”

Castiel drops his head back down with a hard thunk that makes Dean wince. “I don’t need to go to the hospital.”

Shaking his head would involve a whole bunch of straps flapping around, so instead Dean waggles his hands, which probably looks like he’s Windexing a ghost’s boobs. “Nope, totally get it, but, uh…fuck, man, at the rate we’re going here, we’ll both be dead by nightfall if we don’t get some adult supervision.” This is just an awesome thing for Dean to say to somebody who has literally been assigned adult supervision _by a judge_ , but even a stopped clock is right twice a hookup.

Castiel makes some vague little throat noise which could be either a chuckle or a death rattle.

Dean reaches up to rub his neck but stops when the latex glove pulls on his skin. His face is already sweaty under this thing. “So, uh. Garth is having a friend stop by to help out.”

Cas cracks his left eye open maybe six millimeters, but that’s all it takes to telegraph his skepticism at the phrase ‘a friend of Garth’s.’ Dean can’t blame him – Garth _is_ the kind of person who’d invite a tapeworm over for Thanksgiving dinner if he found out it didn’t have any family in town.

Dean sighs. “Don’t worry, he’s not sending over a plumber or something. It’s a nurse he knows from Memorial. His name’s Charlie.”

* * *

His name’s not Charlie.

“Oh, it’s short for Charlene. Which is kinda actually short for Celeste?” she says. “LOL.” She actually says it like that – _lawl,_ which instantly ages Dean by fifteen years. By the time she leaves he’s gonna reach up to pull off the respirator and his emaciated skull will just topple off his neckbones and bounce across the floor, like the girl with the green ribbon. (From that one story, you know? Dean remembers reading it to Sam and it totally fucking traumatized him, which ruled.)

Anyway, Charlie is a perky little redhead who could probably fit inside an ice cream cone, but she has the impact of a Taylor Swift arena concert circa 2012. She shows up in scrubs, aka the plain brown paper bag of clothing, but hers are sinus-infection yellow and decorated with little…what’s the name of the pixelly cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart body that shits rainbows in space? Little _thats._ It’s a lot. Dean is so caught up in processing the Totality of Charlie that it takes him a few seconds to realize she’s not wearing a mask at all.

“Beeteedubs, I love your respirator,” she says, setting an authoritative-looking duffel bag down on the dusty kitchen lino and bending over to rummage around. “Have you seen _Contagion_? That movie is so messed up. But Kate Winslet, _oof_ , amirite?”

“Um,” Dean replies. “Shouldn’t… _you_ …have one?”

“Don’t need it,” she chirps. “I’m Nermo.”

“The shitty kitten from _Garfield_?” Dean feels like maybe he’s running a little short on oxygen.

“Oh my god, _stop,_ ” Charlie trills, apparently delighted. “NRMO. Non-reactive to male omegas.” She slides her fingers under a sheet of hair that’s the same color as 24 gauge roofing copper, flips it over her shoulder and yokes it up with an elastic hair tie in one smooth motion. “It should _really_ be andro _morphic_ omegas, but insurance company billing departments aren’t really into progressive terminology, you know?”

She sighs, pops out a Nalgene absolutely plastered in stickers, takes a glug of whatever Mystery Fluid is inside, and disappears it again. “Anyway, I still pick up some shifts at Memorial, but now I mostly do home heat care for patients who can’t take suppressants. Clients really like that they don’t have to worry about me going all wolf-whistle awooga heart eyes on them.”

Somehow she must catch a whiff of The Poors off of Dean, because she immediately adds, “This one’s totally on the house, though. I owe Garth a few zillion favors. Just don’t tell my agency or, like. Sue me.”

Dean glances around the front room, which is up to off-hours site safety standards for people who have _already_ given themselves accidental nailgun stigmata,but is still essentially a game of Spot The Liabilities. “I won’t if you won’t,” he says.

“Cool beans,” Charlie laughs. “Here, touch up your blockers, you’re a lil whiffy.” She tosses him a little travel bottle of the medical-grade stuff, the kind that doesn’t doesn’t just break up your individual stink molecules but straight-up bricks your glands. Medical blockers always make Dean feel like he’s smuggling marbles in all of his ticklish places, which isn’t as tee-hee as it sounds, but sparing Cas is worth the discomfort. He retreats to the bathroom so Charlie isn’t treated to the sight of him scrubbing at his pits ’n bits, but she nods in approval when he comes back out smelling like the void.

"Now let’s go check on your guy, okay?”

“He’s not really my –“ Dean starts, but Charlie cuts him off with the snap of a fresh blue glove on her wrist. Dean’s asshole reflexively tightens in self-defense, and if she didn’t seem like basically the human girl version of Lambchop, he would’ve sworn she did it on purpose.

“Oh,” she says, halfway down the hallway. “What kind of suppressants are you on?”

Dean mumbles some approximation of the brand name, a big wad of X’s and Z’s that would fuck shit _up_ in Scrabble. It’s not available in generic, but Dean pays cash out of pocket for this stuff because he believes in buying yourself the nicest version available of exactly three things in life: motor oil, work boots, and birth control.

“Wow, that’s like the QE2 of supps. You can actually take off the big ole mask.”

“Seriously? Won’t I –“

“Yeah no, you’ll be totally fine. Like you might have an estrus reaction to somebody in unmedicated _rut_ , but as long as you avoid fluid exchange, you don’t have to worry about a sympathetic heat. Maaaaybe it’d be an issue you were on some of the low-dose stuff. But you’re basically wearing hormone Kevlar. _Pew pew,_ ” she says, and mimes bullets bouncing off of his pecs.

“Sweet,” he mumbles.Dean’s really kind annoyed how much how he non-consensually likes this chick, because it would be a _lot_ more on-brand if she annoyed the shit out of him.

He peels off the respirator, only rips out a few eye-watering hairs from the back of his neck. He scrubs at the sweaty mask-lines on his cheeks and nods Charlie to the office door.

She hitches her shoulder up against it to lean it open. “I mean I _guess_ you might pop a boner or something, but who _doesn’t_ sometimes, right? Anyway, I won’t judge.”

“What,” Dean says, as she waltzes in.

* * *

Dean’s never actually been to a blow-out orgy on the manufacturing floor of a recently pipe-bombed Pine-Sol factory, but he figures that he can go ahead and scratch that one off his bucket list.

The paint fumes do add their own special magic, of course, but Cas has _definitely_ dried off – or, if he still looks a little on the moist side, it’s from his own sweat and _[redacted, you fuckin’ creep]._

At least Dean doesn’t have to worry about sporting a live one. The difference between this and the way Cas smelled yesterday (and the impact it had on Dean’s sad little caveman pea-brain) is sort of like the difference between spotting a banana cream pie in the dessert case at a diner and getting an entire jug of banana flavor syrup pumped down your throat with a nasogastric feeding tube. It’s like his dick is so overwhelmed that it just passes out for the duration.

The rest of Dean sticks around, though,long enough for Charlie to introduce herself and take Cas’s heart rate and point one of those infrared thermometers at his forehead – for a second Dean thinks it’s a laser level, which, the guy definitely has an architectural kind of brow, so it sort of makes sense, somehow? Dean has not had any coffee, and his brain is dented.

Then they obviously run out of the stuff that’s approved for viewing by general audiences. Cas is still swaddled up in his beach towel burrito, so Charlie takes the excuse to send Dean out of the room to grab Cas’s clothes and an actual blanket – which Dean absolutely should’ve done way before this, but didn’t because he’s a terrible… not-even-close-to-a-boyfriend. Almost-a-hookup. Sort-of-friend-with-benefits-subject-to-further-negotiation? _Gym member_.

He gathers up the scratchy polyester throws from the living room, his newly liberated schnoz helpfully pointing out which blanket had the privilege of absorbing Dean’s overnight pepperoni farts and which one Cas was cooking away in. Dean averts his gaze from any potential stains and checks that his gloves are holding up okay before he grabs the blanket, just in case “fluid exchange” goes that far. Smellwise the blankets aren’t _quite_ at Pine-Sol orgy bomb levels – maybe somewhere more in the range of “rowdy three-way at the Christmas tree lot.”

Setting aside the humpy _mise-en-smell_ , though, Dean is pretty fucking relieved that he finds this entire situation so _profoundly_ un-sexy.

Like, sure. He’s not some Problem Alpha out there acting like he’s God’s gift to orifices, but M/O means he’s been on both ends (shut up, _seriously_ ) of the hormonal dumb-dumbs. Just because your heats are on ice doesn’t mean you’re a goddamn monk or that you smell like a lamp, and Dean sincerely hopes that his personal episodes of whiskey + drippy bits have never added up to somebody else’s worst night on earth. He doesn’t _think_ they have, but there are some parts of the archives that just read DATA CORRUPTED, so who the hell knows? He’s taken one breathalyzer test and one paternity test and he squeaked by both out of sheer fucking luck _only_ , so by the law of averages there are probably a few hundred people out there who would happily use his face as a dartboard.

 _Be that as it may –_ this was Sam’s pet phrase coming out of law school until Dean roasted him out of it – _be that as it may,_ the fact is that right now there is an obnoxiously attractive and basically helpless naked person off-gassing sex fumes in the spare room, and all Dean wants to do is find him some Gatorade and give him his underwear back.

(If Castiel _had_ underwear, that is. After a few minutes of fuzzy-headed searching, Dean realizes that his brain _isn’t_ malfunctioning, it’s that Castiel _was not_ _wearing_ any, which is retrospectively _ag o ni zin g._ )

So anyway, Dean’s feeling pretty okay about his new status as Not Actual Horny Garbage, even if it comes with a Barry Bonds-level pharmaceutical asterisk. A real fuckin’ Boy Scout, right here.

* * *

Cas is still on the dropsheet, but he’s at least sitting up, and he’s not shivering or sweating blood and his head’s not spinning around on his shoulders. He is, in fact, slurping his way through an itty bitty box of apple juice.

“What, no animal crackers?” Dean asks.

“Fresh out,” Charlie answers. “But how do you feel about _raisins?_ ” She rattles a little cardboard box of ‘em, the kind you buy for trick-or-treaters when you suck.

Dean _bleah_ s her off. “Save ‘em for the sick guy.”

Castiel finishes off the juice, sets down the box like it’s a fragile family heirloom. “I’m not sick,” he says, sickly (sicklyly? sickishly? Fuck English). “This is just a normal biological process that society has decided is too troublesome to accommodate.”

“ _That’s_ what he’s normally like,” Dean says to Charlie, thumbing at Cas. “In case you were worried.”

“Good to know,” Charlie laughs, then turns back to her patient. “You’re actually meetin’ the criteria for a few minor conditions here, guy, but as long as you keep improving with juice and ibuprofen, nobody’s gonna ride your ass about it.”

Castiel snorts.

Charlie clucks. “Little heat nurse humor for you there. Laughter’s the best medicine, amirite?”

“Don’t quit your dayjob,” Cas rumbles, and closes his eyes again, like a crocodile sinking back under the mud.

* * *

“So he’s doin’ okay?” Dean asks her, as she’s packing up.

Charlie nods and stuffs the thermometer back in its zipper pouch. “Yeah, he shouldn’t crash like that again as long as you keep him hydrated and fed.”

“Uh, I dunno that I should be the one who – I mean. Was I, um.”

Charlie looks back up at him, and Dean experiences a spontaneous reoccurence of the itchy, full-body blush he was hit with in sixth grade, when Dad had _his goddamn girlfriend_ give him The Talk. Apparently it’s been lurking in Dean’s bones this whole time, waiting for him to experience _just_ enough sexual humiliation to justify a reemergence. Now it is raging across every visible patch of skin on his body; probably his eyes have changed color.

Charlie lets Dean twist in the wind for a few more centuries before she finally takes pity and cuts him down from the Asshole Tree. “Were you…the reason Castiel went into heat?” she finishes for him.

Dean swallows, crosses his arms, shoves his hands into his armpits, toes the floorboards (nasty ol’ pine, nothing cool), clears his throat, dissolves into a zillion spiky little shame atoms.

“No, probably not,” Charlie continues, in that cool, even Nurse Voice. “I mean, not unless you had another… _friend_ over.”

“There were a bunch of guys here yesterday,” Dean says, and Charlie’s eyebrows head for the ceiling, “But uh, just. Socially. Work party. They all left by late afternoon.”

“Any alphas in there?”

“Few hundred pounds of ‘em, yeah, but everybody had blockers–“

“That they reapplied every forty minutes? On _top_ of taking prescription supps?”

“I mean…” Dean knows for a fact that Benny would trade in his left nut before he’d pop a pill. “Nobody was in _rut_.”

“Not actually a requirement,” Charlie says, crisply. “If Castiel isn’t on suppressants, just being around a bunch of sweaty new alphas could be enough to kick things off. Fooling around after probably just sealed the deal-io.” Dean must be visibly collapsing in on himself, because she jumps in to add– “But don’t kick yourself too hard, okay? They don’t teach this stuff in sex ed. And Castiel’s an adult who knows his own system really well, and it obviously took _him_ by surprise.”

Dean scrubs at his face, but unfortunately it doesn’t come off.

“Hey,” Charlie says, from the other side of his palm calluses. “Seriously, Dean. Don’t wig out about it. Shit happens. You can pay Castiel back by looking out for him til he’s out of the woods. At this point, you being around isn’t gonna make him more symptomatic. Hormonally it’ll probably _help_.”

“Uh,” Dean says, dropping his hands. “How’s that?” (Not that there’s _actually_ any medical magic to riding a dick with a knot – unless you’re dumb enough to bareback, it’s nothing that can’t be achieved with some tongue and a funny-shaped zucchini.)

Charlie swats him on the arm. “I mean _pheromonally_. You’ll be a lot easier to tolerate than an alpha, or even just an unfamiliar person like me.” Dean vaguely notes the sidestep on her own dez – healthcare people _usually_ smell like a 404, but tend to be pretty forthcoming with their IDs just so nobody gets freaked out. Hell, the home hospice people wore _color-coded bracelets_. (Omega was hot Barbie pink, of _fucking_ course.)

She narrows her eyes. “But, while it’s officially None of My Business, I _will_ warn you that, omega or not, it’s usually not a great idea to have sex with somebody for the first time when they’re in heat.”

Dean splutters. “Jesus, lady, I’m not Jack the Ripper here.”

Charlie waggles her head, sending that red ponytail jogging around. “I’m not worried about Castiel’s ability to consent, or about his safety with you. It’s just that if _anything_ went wrong, I think you’d probably kick yourself to death.”

Dean rolls his shoulder so he can break eye contact for a second. (Fuck, he’s sore from that fall. He’s finally hit that age where stiffening up in _anticipation_ of eating shit is worse than the actual shit-eating.) “Shows what you know. I’m more of a walk-into-the-ocean kinda guy.”

Charlie wrinkles her cute lil nose. “Hm. Not a lotta ocean around here.”

“See? Nothin’ to worry about.”

“Speaking of which.” Charlie whips a little flashlight out of her Mary Poppins bag. “Garth told me about your tumble yesterday. You wanna show me those pupils so he doesn’t put out a hit on me?”

Dean lets her check out his pupils, bending over so she doesn’t have to stand on her toes.

“Lookin’ fine. Just give yourself a couple days before you try to drive further than the mailbox, read the ingredient list on your Cocoa Puffs, or speedrun Castlevania.”

“Meh. Metroid’s better.”

“I knew I liked you,” Charlie says. She tosses the flashlight and peels off the gloves. “So, where can I give you crazy kids a ride to? You guys are a little bit maxi for my Mini, but hey, it’s an excuse to cuddle, right?”

Dean blinks. “Uh…I thought we’d…just…stay here? Until Cas is good to go home.”

“Mmkay. You realize this place is basically a desert island with a sofa, right?”

Dean tries to think of an argument, but comes up with bupkis. If Cas needs help, and Dean still can’t drive – taxis won’t come out here for love or money, and Antarctica gets better Uber coverage; everybody he knows with wheels is either an alpha or lives on the other side of the moon. Neither of them is gonna survive a two-hour public transit odyssey, either. (Castiel due to…everything, and Dean due to still having a few molecules of pride left _._ ) The only food left in the house is half a slice of pizza that’s been festering at room temperature for the last eighteen hours, and one bag of Canadian ketchup chips that Ash brought over because he’s a goddamn troll.

Charlie smiles.

* * *

So before he can piece together exactly how his life led him to this point, Dean is crammed into the back seat of a car designed by and for the cartoon ladybug demographic, driven by a manic pixie dream nurse he’s known for forty minutes, rubbing elbows (and shoulders, and hips, and thighs, and knees) with a sweaty nutcase yoga teacher who’s wearing a dog towel like it’s a James Brown cape. Castiel konks out after two freeway exits, head thrown back but somehow keeping his mouth closed, so instead of snoring or drooling he looks like some kind of saint – you know, one of the hot ones who look like they were martyred by a blowjob and that all the monks probably whacked off to in Olden Times. It just ain’t _fair._

Sam’s probably still face-down, snoring _and_ drooling on his keyboard right now, but Dean manages to extract his phone (from his _shirt_ pocket, thank Christ) and shoots Sam a courtesy text.

_hey_

_hoing to cas’s place for a bit_

_*GOING_

_goddammit_


End file.
